A Midsummer Night's Dream Study Guide
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SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564–1616)
English playwright, poet, and actor. Shakespeare
is universally recognized as the foremost
writer in the English language to date. The thirtyseven
plays associated with his name, including the
major tragedies Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and
Macbeth, and his romances and comedies, Twelfth
Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream among
them, have been translated into many languages and
have crossed all kinds of cultural divide. His poetry,
in particular his intricately woven and fiercely passionate
love sonnets, have stirred the senses of
reader and critic alike for generations past and will
do so for generations to come.
Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon
in Warwickshire, England, and he was probably educated
in the 1570s at the free grammar school
there known as the King’s New School. His father,
John Shakespeare, has been described as a glover or
whittawer, which means someone who works with
animal skins. Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden,
was from a noted local family, the daughter of Robert
Arden, John Shakespeare’s landlord. At some
point, perhaps in 1568 when his father was high
bailiff (mayor) of the town and responsible for
Stratford’s entertainment, Shakespeare must have
first seen actors perform as traveling players visiting
on tour.
In about 1582, Shakespeare married Anne
Hathaway, a rich yeoman’s daughter. The marriage
was undertaken during a notable downturn in the
affairs of Shakespeare’s father. Having been a respected
and confident town official during Shakespeare’s
earliest years—initiating an application for
gentry status in 1576, for example—during 1586
John Shakespeare’s alderman status was withdrawn.
Although controversy surrounds the possible reasons
for Shakespeare’s marriage to a woman who
was eight years his senior, three children were produced
from the marriage. Susanna was the first-born
in 1583 with a pair of twins produced in 1585—a
son, Hamnet, who died in childhood, and a daughter,
Judith.
William Shakespeare. AP/WIDEWORLD
LONDON ACTOR, PLAYWRIGHT, AND POET
Whether Shakespeare had to leave Stratford for
some reason, or whether he joined a visiting touring
company such as the Queen’s Men, we first hear of
him as a London playhouse personality seven years
after the birth of the twins. This is when he is
mentioned in a pamphlet called A Groatsworth of
Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592)
written by a writer and playwright named Robert
Greene. This text was written while the writer knew
that he was dying, and in it he urged his fellow welleducated
peers, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas
Nashe, and George Peele, to forsake the stage. ‘‘For
there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,’’
Greene wrote, ‘‘that with his ‘Tiger’s heart
wrapped in a player’s hide’ supposes he is as well
able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you,
and [ . . . ] is in his own conceit the only Shakescene
in a country.’’ We know this allusion is directed
toward Shakespeare, not only because of the
play on his name and profession as a ‘‘Shake-scene,’’
but also because of the misquotation from one of his
Henry VI plays: ‘‘O Tiger’s heart wrapped in a
woman’s hide!’’ (Part III, act 1, scene 4, line 138).
By this time, scholars believe that the player
Shakespeare had not only embarked on his English
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history cycle with the three Henry VI plays, but had
also presented the highly successful if violent Titus
Andronicus as well. In this play a woman is raped,
has both her hands cut off and her tongue cut out,
and a queen unknowingly eats her own children,
baked in a pie. However, in a matter of a few years
Shakespeare was also provably capable of writing the
extraordinarily poised and tragic Romeo and Juliet.
Here two young lovers, divided by their families’
antagonism to one another, meet, marry, and die
while speaking the most beautiful words of love
written for the English stage.
By 1595, Shakespeare, as a sharer member of
the acting company called the Lord Chamberlain’s
Men, was entitled to a portion of the company’s
takings. This status was acquired through his investment
in things for the company like costumes,
playbooks, and props. However, there is some evidence
to show that Shakespeare wanted to be perceived
more as a serious poet than as either an actor
or a playwright. In 1593 and 1594 he published his
two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The
Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to his supposed
patron Henry Wroithesley, 3rd earl of Southampton.
This period also marks the time when it is
believed he had begun his 154 sonnets, published as
a collection in 1609, with Southampton a candidate
for the ‘‘Fair Youth’’ to whom the first 126 possibly
allude. The fourteen-line sonnet, quietly evolving in
form since its first emergence in fourteenth-century
Italy, had reached England through poet-courtiers
such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey
earlier in the sixteenth century. In the hands of
Shakespeare, many sonnet conventions were challenged,
questioning the poetic expectation of comparing
one’s lover to nature, for example. ‘‘My mistress’
eyes are nothing like the sun’’ is the bold
opening of Number 130, for example. Thus Shakespeare
chose to use the sonnet to engage, not only
with the passions and intellect of the person to
whom the sonnet is addressed, but even with poetry
itself. It is interesting that Greene chose to mark out
Shakespeare’s verse as his primary objection to him
as an ‘‘upstart.’’ Shakespeare indeed wrote much of
his drama in blank verse, the flexible iambic pentameter
form of unrhymed poetry, again used by Henry
Howard, the earl of Surrey, and taken on by dramatists
such as Christopher Marlowe. However, Shakespeare’s energy when approaching his plays
did not hold back on inventiveness and variety. The
blank verse form reached its apotheosis with Shakespeare,
but a few of his early plays contain sonnet
moments too. The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet,
given by the Chorus, is a sonnet, and later in this
lovers’ play, one is interwoven through the dialogue
when the protagonists first speak together (act 1,
scene 5, lines 90–113).
By the turn of the seventeenth century, the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men had rebuilt their Shoreditch
amphitheater (called the ‘‘Theater’’) as the
Globe on London’s Bankside (the south bank of the
Thames). They were now the most well established
of the city’s playing companies. By this time Shakespeare
had begun to write his heavyweight tragedies
for them, beginning with Hamlet published in
1603. If Titus Andronicus was violent, and Romeo
and Juliet tragically romantic, Hamlet was Shakespeare’s
play concerned with the human mind. The
eponymous prince of Denmark, whose father’s
ghost tells him how he was murdered by Hamlet’s
uncle, sets out on a course of revenge, while at the
same time, as the philosopher prince studying at
Wittenburg University, he questions life and death
and any decision involving them. Shakespeare is creative
with the revenge tragedy form, using the
vengeful mindset of the main character to explore
highly philosophical questions. ‘What a piece of
work is man!’ (act 2, scene 2, lines 293–300) and
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ (act 3,
scene 1, lines 58–90) are two lines from speeches of
profound mental depth. Hamlet is the most widely
quoted and most investigated of Shakespeare’s
plays, attracting a phenomenal amount of scholarly
study, just as much because of the questions it poses
as because of the answers it fails to give.
THE JACOBEAN SHAKESPEARE
In 1603, after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the
accession of James I, the company were renamed
the King’s Men, acquiring royal patronage status. In
1608 they also acquired a new, small, more select
playhouse known as the Blackfriars that was to be
used alongside the Globe, the public playhouse.
Shares in this venture, which company members
were given, were very lucrative acquirements for the
actors—including Shakespeare. This period marked
the writing of plays such as Othello, first performed
1603–1604 and published in the 1620s, King Lear
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of 1606, published in 1608, and Macbeth, again
c. 1606 but first published in the collected First
Folio of Shakespeare’s works of 1623. The plot lines
and characters of these tragedies continued to demonstrate
the extraordinary range of Shakespeare’s
mind as he dealt with, for example, jealousy and
deception in Othello; madness, mercy, and true filial
love in King Lear; and the dangers of encouraged
ambition in Macbeth. In about 1613, however, at
the peak of his writing powers, Shakespeare was to
give up his career on London’s stage.
SHAKESPEARE THE STRATFORD MAN
By 1616, Shakespeare had returned to Stratford and
the substantial home called New Place that he had
bought for his family. It was there that he was to die
in 1616 of a fever, reputedly after a rowdy visit from
his friend and colleague Ben Jonson. He died where
he began, therefore, not in London where he made
his name, but in the Stratford of his birth. Back in
1596, gentry status had finally been achieved for his
family, and the payee for this was likely to have been
William. He died, therefore, not only rich, but respected
and esteemed in his community, to become
later in the minds of many the man most associated
with the finest use of poetic English.
In the historical context of his day-to-day existence
as an actor and a companyman, Shakespeare’s
significant output as a dramatic writer can be interpreted
as simple good business sense that resulted in
his family’s bettered status at home. By writing
good plays he drew audiences to playhouses in
which he had financial interests. Shakespeare’s plays
did not, in fact, belong to him, but were the property
of his company. Despite evidence that Shakespeare
was involved in the printing of his poetry,
there is no proof of authorial concern with the
printed publication of his plays. His dramas were
only collected as serious ‘‘works’’ seven years after
his death in 1623 for what we now know as Shakespeare’s
‘‘First Folio,’’ put together by his fellow
actors. A man of extraordinary talent, however, at a
time when there were no rulebooks for the English
language or its lexicon, his contribution to what we
now perceive as beauty through dramatic story and
words is inestimable.
See also Beaumont and Fletcher; Drama: English; English
Literature and Language; Jonson, Ben; Marlowe,
Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Shakespeare, William. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Norton
facsimile, prepared by Charlton Hinman. 2nd ed. New
York and London, 1996.
—. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen
Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine
Eisaman Maus. New York and London, 1997.
Based on the Oxford Edition.
—. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited by Stephen Booth.
New Haven, 1997.
Secondary Sources
Dobson, Michael, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Oxford Companion
to Shakespeare. Oxford, 2001.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642. 3rd ed.
Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
Jones, Peter, ed. Shakespeare, the Sonnets: A Casebook. London,
1977.
Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. New York, 2001.
Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare’s Lives. Rev. ed. Oxford and
New York, 1991.
EVA GRIFFITH
